[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

Whoa! I love a good 2x2, and the one on the Diataxis home page is great!

Adding a caption here for anyone on a screen-reader, before I give commentary on it:

  * X-axis: "serve our study" vs "serve our work"
  * Y-axis: "practical steps" vs "theoretical knowledge"
  * which gives 4 quadrants: how-to guides, tutorials, explanation, and reference

So I'm joining a new place recently, and it's another one of those "documentation-heavy" places where (of course) every new hire conducts the ceremonial ritual of updating the docs wherever they could use improvement. I really like having this ontology in my head now; I can see it being very useful.

Also, I wonder if the relative distributions of each one could tell you something about the team's health — or even just the kind of work the team does?

For example, between two teams who are both documentation-heavy, what does it means if one team's docbase is 80% tutorials, whereas the other team's is 80% reference guides? It would be fascinating if anyone's already given thought to relative metrics/heuristics like this.

[ebiester]

Almost every developer I've ever seen defaults to "explanation." Reference is there to the extent that it can be auto-generated, but most companies are relatively light on reference. Tutorials are pretty rare in smaller orgs - it rarely gets prioritized.

How-tos are an interesting case. I see a lot of informal how-tos in slack. However, how-tos also are the most likely to become stale because if they're needed often enough, they tend to become automated in part or whole. It is by its very nature transitory.